


Ruin This for Everyone

by nimblermortal



Category: Macbeth - Shakespeare
Genre: Bitterness, F/M, Feminist Themes, Gen, futility
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-16 16:31:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5832694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teenaged Gruoch is bitter and angry and violent. Someone thought it would be fun to send kind and gentle squire Banquo to attend her in the middle of a fit. Gruoch thought it might be fun to break him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ruin This for Everyone

Lady Macbeth likes to think that she broke Banquo.

He was a handsome boy, riding in behind her father, stepping in place behind him perfectly. He always knew his place, did Banquo, and never noticed the effect he had on others. She, seeing him, had hated him immediately because she knew that he was handsome. She hated that she knew that, and wished she could carve the knowledge right out of her heart.

She didn’t speak to him for weeks. She knows that because her parents remarked on it; she saw their hidden smiles, and hated those too. She knew Banquo would be a good match, and that made her hate him more. And the hating made it all the more difficult to stop staring at him - glaring at him - and his smooth cheeks and his fine curls and those large eyes that kept asking her why.

He ought to know why, she thought - or else he was just as stupid and thoughtless as everyone else.

She met Banquo when she was screaming in her room. Someone thought it would be clever to send him to her. She likes to imagine what he saw when he first entered: sheets strewn across the floor with trinkets and the dishes from breakfast, ripped cloth, a single shattered dish because someone had trusted her with pottery, and in the middle of it this girl who everyone said was beautiful, her hair a wreck and her cheek smeared with blood. It was her hand that was cut, after dashing the clay bowl against the wall, but she had pulled at her hair and pushed at her face enough to smear the blood wherever she wanted it. She had screamed herself hoarse.

“Lady,” he had said, sounding helpless and hovering aimlessly in the door, “can I help you?”

“Nothing you can do will ever help anyone,” she snapped.

“Why not?” he asked, and she screamed at him until her voice broke. He was still listening when her voice broke, and still listening when she kept speaking softly but intensely, and still listening when she found herself staring at her single bloodied hand and speaking in a quiet voice, listing dully the fate that awaited her and everyone like her, and how she could not bear to think of a thousand women marrying to cook and clean and host and sew and never look up, no, not for a moment, their necks too far twisted over quilting to be able to turn that way again. It was their blinkers that threatened her and their muteness that made her scream until her voice was a whisper.

When she glanced at him, his eyes were wet, and he was offering her a cup of water. A clay cup. She took it and held it in both hands because each trembled with anger and exhaustion, and she drank the whole thing in one draught.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

“There’s nothing to be done,” she said, the words tasting as if the cup had been filled with wormwood. “There’s nothing anyone can do but scream.”

He stood for a long moment, shifting his weight from foot to foot, presumably wanting to slay dragons or boars or at least offer her a nice hawk to make her feel sweet and biddable again. The sort of thing young knights were supposed to do for beautiful women.

“You’re hurt,” he said. “May I wipe away the blood?”

He offered her more water, and cleaned her hands, and she let him wipe them clean as her blood sifted into his bowl of water, not enough yet to make it run red. He had cloth, too, and she did not question where these things came from because she was tired, so tired, and her eyes ached with salt. He tied a bandage round her hand and dipped a handkerchief in the bowl of blood and water to wipe her cheek clean as well, and because there was nothing he could do, he tucked her into bed and bid her sleep.

He broke not because she was broken, but because there was nothing she could do; and if it was only her powerlessness that could break him, well, she took that weapon in both hands. It was not enough. It would never be enough. But after that she could crack his mood in two with a look, and it made every dinner, every dance, every hunting trip the sweeter because Banquo was by her side, and while she could do nothing for herself, she could break him, again and again and again.

He came from a good family; she could not forget that. Her parents delighted that she liked this charming, handsome young knight-to-be. It would be a good alliance. She could break him whenever she pleased. They would be so proud.

She would never marry him.

It wasn’t hers to choose. Banquo was of good family; if her parents said yes, and his, then she would wear the dress and say the words and accept the ring, and the only thing she could do about it would be to split the dress in two when they were alone and swear that she would split everything of his in two, not to take her half but just to see the line where it had broken.

“Gruoch,” he said, and her name was safe in his mouth, the deep roll of the R and the storm clouds that chased the ending across his palate. Later she would ask another in her marriage bed  _ Do you even know my name? _ but no one would ever say it like Banquo did.

She wouldn’t marry Banquo; her parents grew impatient, and they promised her to someone else. She would wear the dress and say the words and accept the ring, and some violent fool stranger would rip her dress. When she heard the news, she went to her room and she closed the door and she sat looking at her hands in her lap, soft and white and clean. She broke nothing. She waited for the tap at the door.

“Don’t you want free of this?” he asked. “Is there nothing you can do?”

“There’s no way out,” she said.

“Surely it gives you some power,” he said helplessly. “He is of good family - you would be influential.” He did not want to marry her either.

“The only power I have is to break things while others are not looking.”

“Is there nothing I can do?” he asked.

She almost said there was nothing. Then she looked at him, kneeling by her chair, his eyes so wide and helpless and close to the tears she could not shed. He wanted so very badly to help, to do the right thing, if someone would only tell him what it was.

She was very good at orders; she had been hearing them all her life.

“Help me ruin this for everyone,” she whispered.

He was so good, she thought, so kind and gentle and as thoughtful as he could be. He was such a chivalrous knight, so trustworthy; her father sent him to deliver her to her husband, on his way home for the last time. He was with her every night to hold her and to help her. He wanted so very badly to be of help.

At her wedding, Gruoch smoothed her hand over her still-flat stomach, and when her husband kissed her, she savored the taste of remarks to come about how little their child resembled this man; when she could reap shame on her family, her husband, this misbegotten child, and all of them would break before her.

Years later, three women with far more power would declare that Banquo’s line would be kings, and Lady Macbeth would see her husband on the throne, and think of Fleance, and bite that comment back. Instead, she’d think to herself _ Not that son. _ Oh no; her husband was king, and her son was his heir, and if Banquo’s line would inherit, it would be because she had made it happen.

This much power she could claim for herself.


End file.
